Andrew Grove, technology pioneer - obituary

Andrew Grove, who has died aged 79, was chief executive of Intel, the US microprocessor maker that was at the heart of the digital revolution; he was also a management guru who expounded the view that in an era of fast-changing technologies, companies require constant innovation and internal renewal to survive.

Having joined Intel as its third employee on the day of its formation in 1968, Andy Grove rose to be its chief executive in 1987 and chairman from 1997 to 2005. The company’s initial focus was the “dynamic random-access memory” (DRAM) chip, of which the Intel 1103, launched in 1970, was the first commercially available and swiftly became the industry standard.

Intel was also developing microprocessors – increasingly powerful miniaturised integrated circuits, capable of running all manner of electronic devices. When Japanese manufacturers began dumping memory chips on world markets at below-cost prices in the 1980s, it was Grove’s strategic decision to stop making DRAMs and concentrate on supplying microprocessors for the burgeoning personal computer market.

Grove: believed that truth and common sense mattered more than power or positionCredit:
AP

IBM’s decision to use Intel microprocessors exclusively in its PCs was a major breakthrough. The Intel386 launched in 1986. Though not without teething problems, it and the Pentium of 1993 were landmark products; the “Intel Inside” logo became a worldwide hallmark of quality.

Under Grove’s forceful leadership, Intel’s sales reached $26 billion a year as it grew to be one of the world’s largest companies by market capitalisation. He was less well known to the wider public than other titans such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, but revered by all of them as one of the true creators of the digital era.

András István Gróf was born into a Jewish family in Budapest on September 2 1936. He and his mother were sheltered by friends under false identities during the war – while his father was in a Nazi labour camp and his grandmother died in Auschwitz.

During the Hungarian uprising in 1956, András escaped into Austria and eventually made his way to the United States, where he changed his name to Andrew Stephen Grove – though he never quite shed his native accent. He studied Chemical Engineering at City College of New York and – hating the weather on the east coast – completed a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963.

Grove’s first job was at Fairchild Semiconductor, where he did research work on early developments of integrated circuits. In 1968 he was the first person to be hired into Intel by its founders, the former Fairchild scientists Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore. The latter was the author of “Moore’s Law”, which encapsulated the advance of digital technology in the dictum that “the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years”. (Intel would eventually produce microprocessors that incorporated more than a million transistors.)

Boffins rather than businessmen, Noyce and Moore delegated much of the running of their new venture to Grove, who found the experience “terrifying” but used it to refine his own approach to management, which later became highly influential throughout the digital world.

He combined scientific analysis with a belief – drawn from his youthful experience of communist Hungary – that truth and common sense mattered more than power or position: “We argue about issues, not the people who advocate them.” He also believed in companies as living organisms that thrive on “constructive confrontation”, regardless of rank, in which the best new ideas are selected and driven forward while the rest are ripped to shreds. The essential point was that corporate leaders should never become complacent.

Grove featured on the covered of Time in 1997Credit:
AP

He drove his business from a bare cubicle office in a manner that could be brutally direct: planning meetings were known as “the Hungarian Inquisition”, while a former executive described being personally mentored by Grove as like a visit to the dentist without Novocain.

It was, said one observer, “not necessarily the most fun place to work”. But in an industry in which many promising ventures ran out of capital before they found profit, or were simply overtaken by next-generation technology, Grove kept Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, at the cutting edge for three decades. He also taught his theories for many years at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and published a number of books including High Output Management (1983), Only The Paranoid Survive (1996) and a memoir, Swimming Across (2001).

A mellower figure in later years, he gave $26 million to the City College of New York to found an engineering school that bears his name and supported a range of other causes, including research into Parkinson’s disease – with which he was diagnosed in 2000, having previously survived prostate cancer following unconventional radiation treatment.

Grove’s lifestyle was modest for a man whose personal wealth was estimated in 2008 at $400 million. He married, in 1958, Eva Kastan, a fellow Hungarian refugee. She survives him with their two daughters.